Flame Of Diablo

This whole trip was madness. She knew that now. What the hell did she think she was doing charging up a mountainside in company with a religious maniac masquerading as a bus driver, several crates of chickens and a goat?

She had seen the look of horrified disbelief come into the hotel clerk’s eyes when she had asked him which was the nearest town to Diablo, and the most direct means of getting there. He had done his level best to dissuade her, protesting that such places were not for the señorita. Then he had tried to persuade her to hire a car, but had made the basic mistake of pointing out that at least then she would be under the protection of the driver. Something in the way he had said this had needled Rachel unbearably.

She had said clearly and coldly, ‘I can look after myself, thank you, Señor.’

It had been a briefly satisfying moment, but he still thought she was mad. She had seen it in his face as he turned away to deal with another guest. And now she tended to agree with him. She had never sat on a more uncomfortable seat, and she doubted whether the bus itself had any springs. If she survived the journey, it would probably be as a hopeless cripple, she decided, as the base of her spine took another hammering.

It had been easier than she expected to persuade the Arviles family that she intended to return to England immediately, in pursuit of the errant Mark. Isabel had been disappointed that she would not even spend a couple of days with them, and Rachel regretted the necessity of deceiving the girl. But she wondered secretly if the Señor and the Señora might not have been quietly relieved at her departure, or could they genuinely have wanted yet another English visitor upsetting the smooth tenor of their life? Certainly she could not have faulted their hospitality.

She had tied a coloured handkerchief over her shoulder-length honey-coloured hair, and donned an enormous pair of sunglasses, but even so she knew that her fair hair and skin were attracting more attention than she desired from the mainly mestizo and Indian passengers, and she guessed that few tourists must travel by this route—particularly blonde, female English tourists.

She wondered if Mark had taken the same frankly death-defying route before her, and had tried to put a few halting questions to the driver before they had set off, but he had stared at her uncomprehendingly, so she had given it up as a bad job.

The bus seemed to be descending again, and slowly as well. Peering down the bus, Rachel could detect a huddle of buildings ahead of them, and guessed they had reached Asuncion.

At first it seemed to bear a depressing resemblance to other small settlements they had passed along the way, with groups of tumbledown shacks lining a small rutted highway, but with a triumphant blast of its horn the bus wound along the road, avoiding groups of children and animals apparently attracted from the shack doorways to watch its passing, and turned into a large square. Here some attempt at least had been made to paint and generally refurbish the buildings and there was a small market in progress. Presumably this was the final destination of the chickens and the goat, Rachel decided, watching their descent from the bus without a sense of overwhelming regret. They had not been the quietest or the sweetest-smelling of travelling companions.

As she alighted in her turn, she found the bus had stopped outside a building which seemed to be Asuncion’s sole hotel. She glanced up at its peeling façade rather doubtfully. It wouldn’t have been her first choice as an overnight stop, but beggars could not be choosers, and besides, there was an outside chance that Mark might have stayed there.

The reception desk was deserted when she got there. Rachel set down her small suitcase and looked around, then rapped impatiently on the desk with her knuckles. Almost as if her action had been a secret signal, a roar of masculine laughter broke out quite close at hand. Rachel jumped, then relaxed, moving her aching shoulders experimentally.

‘I wish I could share the joke,’ she muttered crossly.

Just then a door down the passage from the desk opened, and a man emerged. He paused before closing the door behind him and tossed a clearly jovial remark in Spanish over his shoulder, which was greeted with yet another burst of laughter. Then he spotted Rachel standing at the desk and his face changed in a moment, becoming both surprised and solemn.

’Señorita?’ His tone as he approached was civil, but Rachel felt she was being very thoroughly assessed, and that there was a strong element of disapproval in his assessment.

She produced her phrase book, and began to laboriously recite a request for a room, but he waved the book aside.

‘I speak a little English. You are an inglesa, Señorita?’

‘Yes, I am.’ Relieved that she did not have to converse with him in her non-existent Spanish, Rachel smiled. ‘I’m trying to trace another inglese, Señor—a man. My brother,’ she added hastily for some reason she probably could not have defined.

‘He has been to Asuncion, this brother?’ The man watched her impassively.

Rachel sighed. ‘I’m not sure. I think so.’

He hesitated, then he reached for the hotel register and swung it round so that she could see it.

‘Look for yourself, señorita. No inglese has been here apart from yourself.’

Rachel scanned swiftly down the list of names. It had occurred to her that Mark might have travelled under an assumed name, but she knew he would not have bothered to disguise his handwriting and none of the scrawls in the register bore the least resemblance to his signature. She felt almost sick with disappointment.

’turistas do not come here, señorita,’ the man said almost placidly. He was turning away, when she halted him.

‘Then can I book a room for the night?’ she asked, braving his look of astonishment. ‘And a guide. I would like to hire a guide if that is possible.’

’Señorita,’ the man said very slowly, ‘I must tell you that I do not have unescorted women staying at my hotel.’

She felt a slow tide of colour run up to the roots of her hair. She had never felt so helpless in her life.

She said, trying to keep her voice calm and pleasant, ‘Then as this is the only hotel in this benighted town, I’m afraid you will have to make an exception for once. Unless you can provide me with a guide immediately, of course.’

His look of astonishment deepened. ‘And where do you wish this guide to take you, señorita? Always supposing that such a person could be found.’

She said baldly, ‘I want to go to Diablo.’

If she’d suddenly produced a hand grenade and drawn the pin, she couldn’t have hoped to make a greater sensation. His jaw dropped, and he almost took a step backwards, she would have sworn to it.

He said flatly, ‘Es imposible. Where is your family, señorita? Who are your friends that they let you contemplate such madness?’

Rachel frowned. All sense of reality seemed to be slipping away from her, but that again could be attributed to the strangeness of the altitude. On the other hand it meant that she had to act the part she had set herself, and it was somehow easier to act than to believe in what she was doing. Deep down inside her she was afraid, but on the surface she was ice cool and in command of the situation.

She said, ‘It’s good of you to be so concerned, Señor, but quite unnecessary. I can look after myself. I’m neither a child nor a fool, and I don’t need you to judge my actions.’

Not a long speech, she thought detachedly, but an effective one, she hoped. In a situation like this, she needed to make every word count.

She glanced at the hotel-keeper, noting with satisfaction that he did not seem quite so sure of himself as he had been. There was an air of uncertainty about him, and he eyed her as if she was something new in his experience. She wanted to giggle, but that would be fatal, so she deepened her expression of calm assurance.

‘There must be someone around here,’ she said crisply.

‘Someone who knows this region well. And you don’t have to feel responsible for anything. Just introduce me to him, and I’ll do the rest.’

The man gave her a long look, then shrugged deeply and fatalistically.

He said slowly, ‘There is such a one—Vitas de Mendoza—but whether he will agree to take you to Diablo is another matter.’

‘That’s my problem,’ she said confidently, almost gaily. She had talked round this definitely hostile little man. She could talk round the world. ‘When can I meet him?’

He hesitated. ‘Later, señorita. I will speak to him of your request. At the moment he is engaged.’

She saw him give a half-glance over his shoulder at that door down the passage, and remembered the sound of men’s voices and laughter.

‘I’d prefer to see him right away. The matter is urgent. I’m not just a casual sightseer, I’m looking for my brother.’

‘And you think the brother has gone to Diablo.’ He shook his head. ‘That is not good, señorita, but it gives me an idea. Tomorrow or the next day there will be an army patrol arriving here. If you speak to Captain Lopez he will look for your brother.’

Rachel was silent for a moment. It was a tempting prospect to resign the responsibility for finding Mark to the army, but at the back of her mind she was remembering what Isabel had told her about the illegal trafficking in emeralds. Supposing when this Captain Lopez found Mark, he actually had emeralds in his possession? She swallowed. It didn’t really bear thinking about. She had no idea of the sort of sentences attempts to smuggle emeralds might carry, but she imagined they would be heavy, and that Colombian prisons would be a bad scene too. Besides, if Mark were arrested, it would be the death of her grandfather.

She had to face the fact that she must find Mark herself—with the help of Vitas de Mendoza, and hope that he was the sort of man who could be bribed to keep his mouth shut if Mark had broken the law in any way. The thought made her feel sick with fright and despair, but it also had to be faced.

‘I haven’t got time to wait for the army,’ she said. ‘You don’t even know yourself when they’ll be arriving, and they could be held up. I’ve got to see this Mendoza man immediately. There’ll be arrangements to make, and I want to leave as soon as possible.’

She left her small case standing by the desk and went down the passage towards the closed door. She wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he’d grabbed her arm and tried to stop her as she passed him. When she reached the door she risked a glance back over her shoulder, and saw that he was standing quite still staring after her with an almost bemused expression on his face, and she could have laughed out loud.

All she had to do now was bemuse Vitas de Mendoza into taking her to Diablo, she thought as she opened the door and stepped into the room beyond.

It was a good job that she was still acting—making an entrance—or what faced her when she entered the room might have thrown her, like an unexpected laugh at a serious moment in a play.

The air was so thick with cigar smoke that she could hardly see across the room for the first moment or two, and the acrid fumes caught at her throat. There were six of them altogether, all men sitting round a table covered in a green cloth. There were bottles and glasses, cards and a scatter of money, and she felt bitterness rise in her throat as she surveyed them. So this was the pressing engagement which the hotel-keeper did not want to disturb.

Her gaze flickered round the table. She could read amazement on their faces, and the beginnings of a lewd appreciation in some of their smiles. And on one face—contempt. Her eyes registered this and passed on, and almost in spite of herself, looked back as though she had not believed what she saw the first time.

He was younger than his companions—the mid-thirties at the very most—dark as they all were, with raven black hair springing back from a peak on his forehead. A thin face, as fierce and arrogant as a hawk’s, its harshness shockingly emphasised by the black patch he wore where his left eye should have been.

The man nearest the door pushed back his chair and stood up, smiling ingratiatingly at her. ‘Come in, chica. You want to take a hand with us?’ He spoke with a strong North America accent. The man next to him said something in Spanish, and a ribald roar of laughter went round the table.

But the man with the eye-patch didn’t join in the general amusement. Rachel found her eyes being drawn unwillingly back to him yet again. He was dressed from head to foot in black, his shirt unbuttoned to halfway down his muscular chest. He leaned back in his chair, one booted leg swinging carelessly over its low wooden arm, but it seemed to Rachel that he was about as relaxed as a curled spring, or a snake rearing back to strike.

Isabel’s voice sounded in her brain: ‘Bandidos and other evil men.’

The others seemed harmless enough—lecherous, perhaps, but harmless, but the man with the eye-patch was a very different proposition. She could believe that he was a bandit. She could see him in black velvet centuries before, a bloodstained sword in his hand as he cut down the defenceless Indians who stood between him and his dream of El Dorado. She could see him on the deck of some pirate ship, his face bleak and saturnine under that eye-patch as his ship’s cannon raked the forts at Cartagena and Maracaibo.

And she could see him on the other side of this table looking at her as if she was dirt.

‘Have a drink, chica.’ The man who had got to his feet was leering at her, pushing a tumbler into her hand. The spirit it contained smelled sharp and raw, and her nose wrinkled in distaste, but she smiled politely as she refused. After all, he might turn out to be this Vitas de Mendoza, and she didn’t want to offend him.

She smiled again, but this time there was a tinge of frost with it, setting them all at a distance. All except the man opposite, of course, who had already distanced himself, and him she would just have to ignore. She wondered what he was doing here. The others were obviously local businessmen enjoying the relaxation of a weekly card game. But who was he? A professional gambler, perhaps, if they had such things in Colombia. Certainly he seemed to have a larger pile of money lying in front of him than any of the others—ill-gotten gains, she thought, and caught at herself. This was ridiculous. She was standing here being fanciful and wasting precious time.

She said quietly but making sure her voice carried, ‘I’m here to see Vitas de Mendoza, and I’d like to speak to him privately.’

She waited for one of the bronzed perspiring men around the table to step forward and identify himself, but no one moved, and a cold sick feeling of apprehension began to swell and grow inside her.

She said, ‘He is here, isn’t he?’ and her voice shook a little because she knew already what the answer was, and she wished herself a million miles away.

The man nearest to her said quite jovially, ‘Would I not do instead, señorita? Dios, Vitas, you have all the luck—with the cards and with the women!’

She looked past him to the man with the eye-patch and saw his lips twist, as if this was one piece of luck he would have preferred to do without. He made no attempt to alter his languid pose, merely leaning back further in his chair and staring at her with a frank, almost sensual appraisal which she found offensive in the extreme.

That hotel-keeper, she thought furiously, must be off his head if he imagined she was going to go off into the wide blue yonder with a man who looked as if his career had spanned the gamut of crimes from armed robbery to rape!

Almost as if he could divine her thoughts, he smiled, a lingering, insolent smile displaying even, startlingly white teeth, and she realised with a sickening jolt that a man who could exude such a potent sexual attraction, apparently at will, would never need to resort to rape.

He stood up then, head and shoulders taller than any other man in the room, as she could see at a glance, lean and graceful like the jaguars who stalked in the undergrowth. A great silver buckle ornamenting the belt which was slung low on his hips, a silver medallion nestling among the dark hairs on his chest—they were the only touches of colour about him—and she remembered her joking resolution to come face to face with the devil himself if need be, and a little involuntary shiver ran through her.

His smile widened and she realised he had gauged her reaction and was amused by it. She forced herself to stand her ground as he approached unhurriedly round the table and came to stand in front of her.

‘I am Vitas de Mendoza, señorita. What do you want with me?’

She was sorely tempted to say it had all been a mistake and beat a hasty retreat. But at the same time, she knew this would accomplish nothing except to make her look a complete fool in front of these men, and that was the last thing she wanted. Her brain worked feverishly, and words rose to her lips.

‘I wish to buy your services, Señor.’

Which wasn’t in the least what she’d intended to say, and she saw the dark brows lift mockingly in response.

He said lazily, ‘You flatter me, of course, querida, but I regret that I am not for sale.’

One or two of his companions laughed, but it was uneasy laughter. Rachel noticed it almost without noticing it, because her face was burning with swift embarrassment at having been betrayed into saying something so ambiguous.

‘You don’t understand.’ In spite of her confusion, she lifted her chin and looked steadily at him. ‘I need a guide—a reliable one. You have been recommended.’ She was aware of it again—that intangible sense of unease in the room after she had spoken. She said, ‘You are a guide, aren’t you? The hotel-keeper said….’

‘You’ve been talking to Ramirez?’ He broke across her rather stumbling words. ‘Well, he’s right. I do know this region better than most men, and my advice to you is go back to Bogota and join one of the organised tours. This is no place for a woman.’

He turned away in dismissal.

‘No, wait.’ Almost before she knew what she was doing, she put out a hand and tugged at the sleeve of his shirt. He stopped and looked down at her hand, and there was a kind of hauteur in his expression. Her fingers looked very white and slender against the dark material, the nails smoothly rounded and painted with her usual pale pink polish. She relinquished the silky material hurriedly, the heat rising in her body as if she had inadvertently touched his skin.

She thought, ‘How dare he look like that! He may have a more educated accent than his friends, but he’s only a guide, after all. He’s for hire. He has to work for his living.’

Something of what she was thinking showed in her tone as she said, ‘Perhaps we could discuss this in private. I’m able to pay for your time, if that’s what’s concerning you.’

‘It is not.’ His face was expressionless, but she had the oddest feeling he was secretly amused. ‘You are a stubborn lady, querida, and a reckless one, I think. You should not offer to pay until you know the price you might be asked.’

‘This would obviously have to be part of the discussion,’ Rachel said. ‘Please talk to me about it at least.’ She heard the almost pleading note in her voice with a sense of shock. That wasn’t what she had intended at all.

‘You imagine your powers of persuasion will be more effective when we are alone?’ he asked, and laughed as the colour rose in her face. ’muy bien, chica, we will talk if you think it will make any difference, but later.’

‘We should talk now. This is important,’ she said in a low voice.

‘To you perhaps,’ he drawled. ‘But at the moment, nothing is more important to me than my game which you have interrupted—and I have a winning hand. I will talk to you later.’

His hand came up, and his lean fingers stroked her cheek in the merest flick of a caress.

Rachel heard herself gasp, as startled as if he had struck her. Or kissed her.

She whirled round and out of the room, slamming the door behind her for emphasis, hearing the echo of laughter follow her.

The reception desk was once more deserted, but she heard a chink of glasses coming from behind a half-opened door to the right of the entrance and went and looked round it. It was a large room with tables and a bar, empty now except for the man called Ramirez who was polishing glasses behind the bar. He looked surprised to see her and she wondered waspishly if he’d known exactly the sort of reception she was going to get—had perhaps even been listening at the door.

‘Your bargain is made, señorita?’ he enquired, straight-faced.

‘Not quite,’ she said too sweetly. ‘We’re going to talk later. I’m afraid that you’re going to have to let me have that room after all.’

He gave her another long look. He was probably wondering why she wasn’t scuttling back to Bogota, her tail between her legs, she thought angrily.

‘Señor de Mendoza said he would speak with you later?’ He sounded incredulous, and she smiled kindly at him.

‘Indeed he did, after we’d got one or two points straightened out. He seemed to have some strange ideas about why I wished to hire him—and a very inflated opinion of his own attractions,’ she added for good measure. But she knew she was being unfair. Vitas de Mendoza was not the sort of man to indulge in illusions, and he could not have failed to know by now that his dark, saturnine good looks and the piratical extravagance of that eye-patch would be the realisation of a thousand women’s fantasies. She just happened to be the thousand and first, that was all.

‘He has reason,’ Ramirez said calmly. He chuckled reminiscently. ‘There was one woman—a norteamericana—she came here with her husband to see the country. Later she returned alone, and Vitas took her into the hills. They were gone a long time.’ He eyed Rachel. ‘Her hair was fair, like yours, señorita,’ he added blandly.

‘I can assure you that is the only resemblance,’ she said coldly. ‘Now can I please see this room? I did not enjoy the journey here, and I’m rather tired.’

He shrugged almost fatalistically. ’si, Señorita.’

The room he showed her was not large, but it was scrupulously clean, the narrow bed gay with Indian blankets, soft as fleece. They were selling similar blankets on the market stalls in the square below and Rachel promised herself she would buy one. But that would be later. All she wanted to do now was lie down on that bed and try to forget that foul bus journey. There was a bathroom just down the corridor with a small, rather reluctant shower, and she stripped and washed the dust and some of her aches away. It was bliss to come back to her room and put on fresh underwear from her small stock, and lock the door and close the shutters, so that the noise from the square became a muted and not intolerable hum, and then stretch out on the bed.

Yet in spite of her bone-weariness, sleep seemed oddly elusive. Strange unconnected images kept coming into her mind—trees by a river with the darkness of a mountain rising behind them—a man wearing black clothes riding a black horse so that he seemed part of it like a pagan centaur—and a fair-haired woman who stood among the trees with her arms outstretched, so that the man bent out of the saddle and lifted her up into his arms, her hair falling like a pale wound across the darkness of his sleeve. Rachel twisted uneasily, trying to banish the image from her mind, but the horse came on until it was close enough for her to see the rider’s face with a black patch set rakishly over one eye. As she watched, the blonde woman moved in his arms, lifting her hands to clasp around his neck, drawing him down to her.

Rachel put out a hand to ward them off. She didn’t want to see this. She didn’t want to know, but her gesture seemed to catch the rider’s eye and he turned to look at her, and so did the woman he was holding, and Rachel saw that the face that stared at her from beneath the curtain of blonde hair was her own.